Ulead Photo Express

This program takes up a hefty 140M of disk space, but it provides plenty of photobased activities.
Images can be imported into the program from scanners, cameras and
video capture cards as well as disk or CD-ROM files. Auto enhance’ gave very pleasing results with the pictures APC used, bringing out details hidden in shadows but preserving good colour in well-lit areas. There are the standard tools for cleaning up photos, including trim (to size or to a variety of shapes), resize, scratch, dust and red-eye removal. Red-eye removal worked very well, once the parameters were adjusted to suit the particular shade of red in the photo.
Smart Select follows the line quite well while you’re tracing around the object, but the result is rather jagged unless there’s a good contrast between the object and its background. Unless the background is fairly plain, it’s not always easy to isolate an object with this technique or by painting with a colour replacement brush, but the latter did the job on some images.
Clip art and backgrounds, as well as extensive range of text and graphics effects, come with Photo Express. The program uses drag and drop to apply adjustments and so on, which quickly becomes a natural way of working.
Like the other programs with frame effects, Photo Express places the frame inside the boundary of the current image. It would be better to give users the option of rescaling the image so that the whole picture fits inside the frame, which then fits in a standard photo size.
Flexible printing options include single images, multiple copies of the same image on one sheet, copies of multiple images on the same sheet, poster-size images over multiple sheets, and a preset for iron-on transfers.
A slim yet friendly manual and a multimedia tutorial quickly get you up and running. An extensive range of customisable projects includes greeting cards, calendars, cut-and-fold framed photos, bogus movie posters and magazine covers, and screensavers. Web cards and albums round out the package. Generally speaking, the program is very straightforward and effective: you pick a template, drop in your photo(s), and then customise other design elements such as the text. A separate program constructs 360° panoramas from a set of photos.